RoCH Fans & Legends draws on the prolific film and television adaptations of The Condor Trilogy (1957-61), a classic ‘new wuxia’ epic by Louis Cha (Cha Leung-yung / Zha Liangyong) aka Jin Yong. The wider project sets out to explore the genre’s recurring tropes and translations in diaspora – its fantasies, landscapes, and archetypes, as well as its ‘poor images‘ and ‘pidgin translations’; ‘RoCH’ is both a reference to the popular shorthand for Return of the Condor Heroes (the second novel in the trilogy), and to the shifting aesthetics of its many spectacular repetitions and ‘returns’. From film and television to anime and comic books, the trilogy’s numerous re-versions reflect evolutions in medium and materiality in tandem with (re)production technologies and distribution platforms. They also attest to its enduring appeal, with multiple productions and co-productions from Hong Kong and mainland China, Taiwan, Japan and Singapore since the late fifties (some 40 to date), as well as innumerable fan-generated dubs and subtitles, fan-fiction extensions and fan-translations into English.

Changing modes and networks of distribution and spectatorship, from bootleg videos tapes to digital formats and online streaming media, enable myriad linguistic and cultural encounters with wuxia. Alluding to questions of authenticity, fantasy, consumption and translation, RoCH Fans & Legends aims to engage some of the languages and spaces between the ‘authorised’ and the ‘amateur’, the ‘licensed’ and ‘unlicensed’, and the ongoing re/de/generations of wuxia fans and legends.

A series of prints (scrolls of Google image search results) signal the specific and generic iconography of The Condor Trilogy, and its uneven, overlapping visual-linguistic circuits of transmission; a VCD of the popular 1983 Hong Kong TV version of Return of the Condor Heroes plays in the space, with Mandarin and Cantonese dubs simultaneously audible; a circle of paper condors/eagles/vultures further kitschifies an already-kitsch cultural symbol; while its multiples invoke translation as a folding process, systematic yet without sameness.